Looking for advice on my homebrew campaign setting

[Manhattanguy]

Hi, everyone. Long-time reader, first-time poster.

I'm going to be launching a 4E campaign shortly. My friends and I have been playing together for about 15 years now, always in the Realms. But I'm not happy with the changes taking place in the 4E Realms and have decided to create my own setting. I was really hoping for some feedback, advice, and suggestions.

I'm taking the "Points of Light" concept fairly seriously and have created a setting in which cities have been almost completely cut off from each other (due to barbarians, wandering monsters, and so forth) for several centuries. The barriers to travel and communication have recently subsided, and the cities are cautiously starting to explore and attempt to re-establish communication and trade.

The PCs would be from a reasonably large city located at the junction of two rivers. For now, I'm thinking of calling the city Three Rivers, on the theory that the ancients would have considered the combined river to be a separate body of water. I don't want to clutter this post with too much detail, but I figure that one river would run roughly west to east, while another river would flow into it from the southeast. The core of the city would be to the north of the east/west river, and would have a variety of neighborhoods, generally getting poorer and more crime-ridden as one progresses to the east. The parcel of land to the southeast (between the two rivers) would be the citadel, while the area in the south and southwest would be essentially a foreign country.

In brief, I see the city's history as follows: it was founded roughly 2,000 to 2,500 years ago as a trading outpost by a group of mercantile cities that were not interested in territorial conquest but instead planted colonies at strategic locations all over the continent, with the intent of forming a large trading network. About 1100 years ago, the city was conquered by a militaristic land-based empire whose rule was, at times, harsh. About 600 years ago, a small country led by a brilliant military tactician defeated the land-based empire and created a new, more enlightened, post-imperial realm. However, civil war broke out among his descendants, and Three Rivers traded hands numerous times over the course of decades of constant warfare. Eventually, things settled down a bit, until the barbarian and wandering monster infestation cut inter-city trade and communication for several centuries.

The city would be ruled by guilds. Each guild would be responsible for the supply and control of skilled and semi-skilled labor in a particular field; for example, there would be guilds for goldsmiths, armorers, brewers, various types of clothiers, etc. The guilds would choose the city's mayor. Some of these guilds would be more important than others, with the top dozen or so effectively forming an executive committee to "advise" the mayor. I anticipate that the inter- and intra-guild politics would be a major ongoing theme of my campaign. While I intend to give my players descriptions of maybe half a dozen guilds, I would intentionally keep a lot of this undeveloped for the time being so that my players can have input (for example, a player might want to be a member of a guild I had not considered, or it might be important to a PC's backstory that his father was a member of a particular guild and that this guild had had a problematic relationship with another guild, etc).

I also plan to build several different ethnic groups into the city. These wouldn't just be dwarves, elves, and so forth, but humans from different ancestral homelands. Notwithstanding the DMG's advice not to have more than 10 languages or so, I plan to have several local languages: the official language of the city (which would be that of the original trading network that founded the city); the court language of the militaristic, land-based empire, which would only ever have been known by the city's upper classes and would now be essentially a nearly-dead "classical" language; the "common" language of the militaristic, land-based empire, which would have been spoken by the empire's soldiers who settled on large country estates with the result that their language is now the primary language spoken in the countryside; the language of a small, tightly-knit ethnic group that immigrated to the city many centuries ago and generally tries to keep to itself while taking part in fairly menial occupations; and the language of a community of cosmopolitan, urban, upper middle class, academically-oriented people that seeded itself in all of the continent's major cities during the ascendancy of the militaristic, land-based empire.

The PCs would be recruited by the guilds to take part in expeditions to re-establish communication and trade with the outside world. I would expect their travels to become more and more ambitious as their power grows. For example, during the heroic tier, the PCs would primarily travel to relatively nearby cities and towns, but would explore to the outer edges of the continent during the paragon tier and throughout the world, and maybe even other planes, during the epic tier.

My big concern is how all this would play out during the actual adventures that the PCs took part in. That is, what's the point in sketching out all of the above if every adventure is essentially "Go into this dungeon and kill the bad guy/recover the treasure/rescue the princess"? I'm not great at designing my own adventures, but so far it seems like there aren't a hell of a lot of published adventures for 4E to choose from.

Also, I'd like to have an overall plot that gradually unfolds during the PC's careers. I'm just having trouble thinking about what that plot would be. The best thing I can come up with right now is that an order of people loyal to the now-defeated militaristic, land-based empire is trying to re-establish that empire, at the cost of the freedom of the cities throughout the continent. Maybe one or more of Three Rivers's guilds could be secretly in league with them. I'd be very grateful for some further thoughts on this or other ideas.

I'd be very interested in any and all feedback on any of the above. Thank you very much.

Manhattanguy

 

[nerdronomicon]

these are just questions to think about that might help you come up with some ideas. they aren't meant as advice or criticism of any of your ideas.

cities are complex and almost require extensive trade to survive. how do cities cut off from the rest of the world survive?

what if the other cities don't want to be contacted? what if in the intervening time without contact they've been taken over by a cult, or what if they blame the pcs' city for the recent dark age?

who's sending the pcs? the government? trade guilds? why are they sending them now? why not next year? why not last year? what's so special about right now?

are they sent by a particular guild? are the other guilds sending emissaries as well? would they view the pcs as competition, or vice versa? what if the pcs get to the other city first? what if they don't?

 

[magnusmalkus]

Cities are complex and almost require extensive trade to survive. how do cities cut off from the rest of the world survive?

I do love the 'Points of Light' approach to setting, but that is the question I get hung up on everytime.

I've just decided that any place that exists has SOME way to support itself... the resources for life must be somewhere nearby. They may not be traditional resources, but... somewhere someTHING helps them survive.

In the same vein, what good is money if the prospect of trading with others outside your own town/village/city doesn't exist? Money just getts recycled within the home town? If someone starts hording money, isn't that going to start trouble?

Like I said before, I love 'Points of Light'... i just wish somethings made more sense to me.

 

[Eosin the Red]

Let's see...

I like the ideas. You know the realms well which is, in my opinion, where you should start. Maybe something in the spirit of Ashabenford (?). It seems a little small (well, very small) for your stated goal but it meets most of the criteria.

I'd work on some backstory ideas - such as wandering barbarians and monsters. Maybe there was some kind of "last Battle" that occurred 200-300 years ago. The armies of the gods met the legions of hell and the earth was rent. Mankind faltered, empires broke, and the survivors of both armies scoured the countryside.

Cities disappeared. Entire towns were slaughtered by demonkin. Three Rivers shuttered her doors and began the long siege. Last summer for the first time in a generation the town received a visitor. A paladin dedicated to Scooby Doo told tales of new kingdoms and new kings. He spoke of harrowing threats undrempt of by the citizens of Three-Rivers. In fact, he is on a mission given to him by the High Poobah of the Mystery Machine. Divinations done by the high priestess Velma warn of a grave danger growing in the mountains/swamps/desert/forest near here. Paladin Shaggy plans to investigate and return by summers end. He never does. The guilds (more on those in a minute) are fearful that some canker festers and that it will soon poison the land. Or worse destroy Three-Rivers. Someone needs to find out what happened to Shaggy.

From here you have a metric ton of directions...

• Shaggy was killed by the evil. Players follow in his path encountering friends and foes before finding the Radiation Monster.
• After finishing the mission the players need to return to the Mystery Machine to warn Velma. [insert half a dozen different encounters including a town that shuttered its walls 200 years ago and they are the first to visit in a generation... maybe the town now serves Orcus and is afraid that the forces of Light are lurking out there in the light of the bright summer]
• Velma tells the party that the evil was only partially destroyed... It served a master who has now gazed upon Three Rivers.
• Return to Three-Rivers [what has changed - new towns folks, someone died, someone missing, another wandering paladin come through leading someones little brother out into the wilderness]
• Fight for Three Rivers - evil wants the town. A nice horde of Flinds plan on making it his.

There. The party is now lurking into Paragon path and you have uncovered a lot more about the world and the players (hence their enemies) during the actual play.


I am interested in the guilds based on the size of the town. Even at 10,000 people (way too much for a base of ops in a PoL setting in my opinion) the guilds will be pretty tiny.

 

[Rechan]

How did you come up with adventures for The Realms? Surely not every one of them was published. Take what you like about Forgotten Realms, and drag it into this game, but twist it enough so that it doesn't seem familiar to your Realms players.

One thing that lept out at me is, if cities have not had any contact (even via magic) with one another... you have a lot of potential:

The whole world could have changed outside of the City's area, and they wouldn't know. Imagine being the first people to venture beyond The City Limits (so to speak), and discovering that the world is not as it used to be. Why? How? There could be planes of glass, lands rent asunder, chaotic magical storms that never cease that rage across the land, and even more fantastic and frightening things.

Take the above, but turn it on its head. The world hasn't changed, but Three Rivers has: the entire city must be evacuated. In a Points of Light setting, that means "holy crap, where do we go? How do we get across this dangerous world to that place?" You could build up to this; the rivers dry up. This takes adventurers to find the source of the problem. The farmlands spoil. A volcano, straight from the Elemental chaos, bubbles up. Eventually, Three Rivers falls. The PCs, having spent all this time defending it, might now be emotionally invested in the people, to find them a better place.

Something is happening with the Planes; the Feywild, or the Shadowfell, opens up an overlap with Three Rivers. Or, some area just outside of The City Limits is a big overlap to the Feywild or the Shadowfell. Here is a great opportunity to send your PCs into one of these planes to negotiate a treaty/deal with whatever Big Honcho is around, so that Three Rivers can co-exist without planar encursions.

Or hey, here's a simple one: The Barbarians Outside (or any other humanoid race)? They've all been massing up. Apparently the tribes have been united by One Big Bad Dude, who has drawn them back to help him build his empire of the wilds. And when the cities open their doors, the barbarian king decides to go on a march against the cities, who are too isolated, and not communicating enough, begin to march.

Or: the PCs are the first to venture out into the world, to visit other cities, and see what has changed for the centuries. They could be explorers, bodyguards to merchants or scholars, they could be miners or landscapers, seeking new resources to expand Three Rivers. This requires them to explore things, bring back word. It might mean that they have to travel to other cities, exploring those Foreign cultures.

My mind buzzes with the possibility of other cities. Ones that are worse off, falling into cannibalism, decay, tyranny, religious fanaticism, plague, ignorance or imbreeding, and so on.

Now, the trick is: pick any few of these, and figure a way to link them. Or drop hints on how they're linked. Don't do it before hand, but afterwards, drop the bomb that 'Yes! The Lord and the Dragon were in league together despite the fact the Lord and the Dragon adventures were three levels apart!"

My big concern is how all this would play out during the actual adventures that the PCs took part in. That is, what's the point in sketching out all of the above if every adventure is essentially "Go into this dungeon and kill the bad guy/recover the treasure/rescue the princess"? I'm not great at designing my own adventures, but so far it seems like there aren't a hell of a lot of published adventures for 4E to choose from.

1) Give the PCs some NPCs or a place that they care about a lot. If the PCs are bodyguards to a scholar or a merchant, and through one leg of the campaign, they're always interacting with this guy and his daughter, then you threaten the guy and the daughter, and the PCs will care.

2) Only flesh out the immediate area the PCs are in. Create a vague sketch of everything outside of that area. Then say, "Pick a direction", and flesh that out a few steps ahead of the PCs. Because if you try to flesh out your entire world, the players will still likely only see 20% of it. Don't burn out creating things no one will ever see.

3) 4e just came out, WotC has only put out one adventure, and all other companies cannot put out a 4e adventure until October 1st (because of licensing issues). If you need an adventure RIGHT NOW, then convert some 3e stuff.

 

[Manhattanguy]

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone.

Nerdronomicon, my thought was that the city wouldn't be cut off at its walls, but would be able to trade with the nearby countryside (say, up to a day's ride away). That would allow them to import crops and so forth. The city's economy wouldn't be thriving by any stretch of the imagination, but with thousands of residents and more in the nearby countryside, they'd be able to have just enough trade to keep people marginally productive.

I imagine that the other cities might have a number of different reactions to being contacted, but would expect that most of them would be starting to reach out themselves. I like to think I can get some interesting plots with cities allying with each other, going to war, falling under sway of large religious or military orders, and so forth.

I figure the PCs would be hired by the government on behalf of the guilds. My thought was that the guilds would be anxious to re-establish foreign markets. I figure that the government would hire a number of characters including the PCs, and would send them on similar missions. I picture the PCs as being more or less on the same team as the other characters, allowing for the possibility of recurring friendly NPCs, "rescue your colleagues" missions, and so forth.

Magnusmalkus, I agree with you on the Points of Light. It's an interesting concept, but a lot of it doesn't seem to make much sense when you really start to think about it. I already told my players the general concept, though, and they all seem reasonably excited about it, so I'm going to try to make it work even if I can't explain things as well as I'd like.

Eosin, I really like your ideas. My working theory is that the barbarians and monsters that cut the cities off from each other were brought about (through magic, pacts, old-fashioned bribery, and so forth) by agents of the militaristic, land-based empire that used to rule much of the continent but was defeated by an upstart centuries ago. I figure that their "Doomsday Plan" could have been to effectively end most inter-city contact, reducing the world to...well, points of light, so that the core city of that empire could rise from the ashes to re-establish its dominion over the continent. This plotline would be revealed only slowly, coming into fruition probably somewhere in mid- to late-paragon tier.

I'm intrigued by your idea that the city hasn't received a single visitor in generations. I was thinking that contact between cities would be almost non-existent, but that the PCs would gradually learn that there had, in fact, been some contact with other cities during the dark ages. My thought is that religious orders would maintain some sporadic contact with their brethren in other cities (with visions and so forth from the gods serving to keep the churches in fairly close doctrinal alignment), while a handful of knightly orders would take it upon themselves to do something similar on a secular level. All of these contacts, however, would be little known and not of much interest to the average person in town. I'd imagine these contacts, by the way, as maybe just a few devoted, well-equipped, well-trained pilgrims that would make it abroad and back every decade or so. But your idea is very interesting, and I really like your suggested plot elements.

Thank you all for your thoughts; I really appreciate it.

 

[Rechan]

It seems I was posting mine when you posted yours, Manhattan. Don't forget me.

 

[Manhattanguy]

Thanks, Rechan. Sorry I didn't respond to you in my earlier message; that's what I get for spending 2 hours writing a half page message.

Interesting ideas. I have to admit, when I read the part about the city dying, it actually upset me a little. I hadn't realized how attached I'd gotten to the city already, and I'd hope my players would get similarly attached, so I'm reluctant to do that to them. Some of my characters are pretty into coming up with interesting characters and doing some real role playing, while others...not so much (one of my players generally tries to avoid coming up with a backstory because "you'll just use it against me later"). But I'm going to really try hard to get them to come up with fairly well-developed backstories and will hope to give each of them a kind of arc, and I expect some of the PCs to ultimately rise to become guild leaders or something similar.

I love your idea about the planes; that could really be the central plot of the epic tier. And I really like the idea of the barbarian ruler leading his declining tribe, in a last ditch effort, against some of the cities. I may be reluctant to destroy the PCs' home city, but I'm not above destroying a well-liked ally.

I feel like things are starting to come together. I figure the characters will be exploring strange cities, with a basic idea of their history and previous culture, but with little idea of how things had changed. I figure that some of the nearby cities will be fairly recognizable, but that cities further out would have changed into something less recognizable. So, the characters will be exploring, and building their own network of friends and contacts, but the world will evolve in the meantime. Alliances will be forged, and some will break apart; wars will be fought; cities will be destroyed. As the PCs grow in power, they will begin to have a real effect on how things develop, possibly bringing some cities into friendly relations with Three Rivers or driving them to war. Eventually, they find out that someone is pulling the strings for evil purposes, and they'll have to deal with it. And then they'll find out that was just the beginning.

I think things are starting to shape up. Thanks again!

 

[Aventar]

Okay this may not be a perfect example for what you want, but I couldn't help but think of the movie version of Aeon FLux.



**SPOILER ALERT***





Okay so essentially the reason I bring it up is that the city itself is an isolated entity of quite a few people after a plague. No one has stepped foot outside the city in hundreds of years and they have forgotten what the world outside the city was like and are afraid of it. Also they engineered their own crops and trade goods and have a "utopian-esque" society, with the obvious dark underbelly.


This gives you a few models and choices to pick up, such as ideas on rituals that produce crops so as to not need trade from outside the city, as well as specially kept sections of the rivers within city walls that they culture seafood and the like. With rituals and magic in general it isn't far fetched idea that maybe the city has used magic for x hundred years to keep its self self sufficient, and now the supplies or magic components for the rituals are running out (think fossil fuels now, such as I dunno OIL) and now prices are going up and life itself is getting interrupted by the shift in economics. So suddenly the various guilds have to gain some new source of wealth and produce to fuel their power schemes. This gives you both a reason to send out pcs to find some of the forgotten towns as well as recources and gives you political machinations to work with. ALso there is a campaign idea on the wizards forum called Let the residium flow, that opens up some of the ideas for you (a good read) that if you remove the airships and the communication between towns, it works for what you need.

 

[the Jester]

One thing that I'd suggest is that your city be half-empty (or even more). In other words, long ago the city hosted 12,000 people. Now, though, only about 3000 people remain- much of the city has been cannibalized, or is in ruins. Occasionally, monsters can come out of some of these ruined buildings. Some of the area within the city can thus be turned into farmland, and it really helps you maintain the illusion that your city could feed itself. (A big city, even with trade with the surrounding countryside, would have a hard time without trade with areas further out.)